Who Faked Amy The Ape?

If You Think The Simian Star Of Congo Is A Real Gorilla, The Movie Has Made A Monkey Of You.

June 12, 1995|By MAL VINCENT The Virginian-Pilot

LOS ANGELES - — From the author of Jurassic Park. From the producer of E.T.

Now, comes Kong, the biggest gorilla of them all.

No.

Correction. Call rewrite. That was another gorilla and another time.

Actually, it's Amy, sweet teen gorilla who loves her human buddy but only wants to get back to the jungle. The flick is Congo, which is, indeed, based on a book by Michael Crichton (the man who writes books that are always suspiciously appropriate for commercial movie adaptation); co-produced by Kathleen Kennedy and directed by her husband, Frank Marshall (a team that worked on megahits like E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

You expect something big from them - after all, they've splashed half the world with huge media billboards of a huge, one-eye-glaring, scowling, gorilla. As a national catch-word, they've added that the Congo is "where you are the endangered species."

In a summer that is over-packed with big, commercial releases, the rest of the Hollywood studios are so scared that they gave Paramount's Congo a weekend all its own to open. Behind the scenes, though, it took $50 million to make the monkey shine, even though the movie has no big-name stars.

What you see in Congo may not be what you think you're seeing. And here is the behind-the-scenes story of how Amy plus a horde of "bad" killer gorillas were created - the pack that intends to add a new chapter to the monkey evolution of simian cinema.

The screenplay was written by John Patrick Shanley, an Oscar winner for Moonstruck.

Shanley was eager to take the writing job because he had already done much of his research. Seventeen years ago he wrote a play called Gorilla. "I spent a year," he said, "reading books and studying chimpanzees and such. The play was a comedy about a zookeeper who wakes up and finds that the gorillas are talking."

Congo's biggest challenge is the character of Amy. She's a 130-pound mountain gorilla who, as trained by a character played by Dylan Walsh, has learned sign language. With the help of a data glove that can read and translate her gestures, she can talk. Amy, at 8, is equivalent to a human teen-ager. Her hobbies are playing with dolls and finger-painting. When she begins drawing pictures of green foliage, it is guessed that she's telling her pals that she wants to return to the jungle.

Shanley says that he freely gave Amy some movie powers she didn't have in the book "because I was encouraged to think that anything I wrote could be reproduced on the screen."

It was quite an assumption.

Producer Kennedy, who also has The Bridges of Madison County currently on the nation's screens, pointed out that "Amy was a good deal more difficult to create than E.T. because, in this case, we were recreating something that is real. In the case of E.T., it was an alien - something that had never been seen."

Director Marshall admits, almost with pride, that there isn't one real gorilla in the movie. "I called Stan Winston," he said, succinctly, "and told him I couldn't make the movie unless we could have close-ups of Amy."Since Winston won Oscars for creating the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the Queen Alien in Aliens, it was only a matter of working it out.

When you see Amy in the film, you're actually seeing two 19-year-old women gymnasts taking their turns in a gorilla suit. When you see a close-up of Amy, the expressions are produced by 27 motors inside - operated by remote control.

Charles Horton, keeper of primates at the Atlanta Zoo, claims that the final look is quite authentic. He, after all, was the technical assistant for the film.

Horton nixed the early tests for Amy "because the teeth were entirely too large. They looked like an adult male. Then, in other tests, she looked too much like a chimpanzee, not a gorilla. Gorillas do have arched eyebrows - so we could use those for expression."

He used two teen gorillas in his zoo, Molly and Cootchie, as models to encourage the moviemakers to get real.